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Monday, December 17, 2012

The gun control debate, like all debates with the left, is reducible to the question of whether we are individuals who make our own decisions or a great squishy social mass that helplessly responds to stimuli. Do people kill with guns or does the availability of guns kill people? Do bad eating habits kill people or does the availability of junk food kill people?

To the left these are distinctions without a difference. If a thing is available then it is the cause of the problem. The individual cannot be held accountable for shooting someone if there are guns for sale. Individuals have no role to play because they are not moral actors, only members of a mob responding to stimuli.

You wouldn't blame a dog for overeating; you blame the owners for overfeeding him. Nor do you blame a dog for biting a neighbor. You might punish him, but the punishment is training, not a recognition of authentic responsibility on the part of the canine. And the way that you think of a dog, is the way that the left thinks of you. When you misbehave, the left looks around for your owner.

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been "liberated" to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it's because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it's because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem.

Individual behavior is a symptom of a social problem. Identify the social problem and you fix the behavior. The individual is nothing, the crowd is everything. Control the mass and you control the individual.

That is how the left approached this election. Instead of appealing to individual interests, they went after identity groups. They targeted low information voters and used behavioral science to find ways to manipulate people. The right treated voters like human beings. The left treated them like lab monkeys. And the lab monkey approach is triumphantly toted by progressives as proof that the left is more intelligent than the right. And what better proof of intelligence can there be than treating half the country like buttons of unthinking responses that you can push to get them to do what you want.

Would you let a lab monkey own a gun? Hell no. Would you let it choose what to eat? Only as an experiment. Would you let it vote for laws in a referendum? Not unless it's trained to push the right button. Would you let it drive a car? Nope. Maybe a bicycle. And if it has to travel a long way, you'll encourage it to use mass transit. Does a monkey have freedom of speech? Only until it annoys you.

You'll take away most of the monkey's bananas, which you're too lazy to go and find for yourself because you have more important things to do than fetch bananas. You train monkeys to fetch bananas for you. That is how the enlightened elites of the left see the workers whose taxes they harvest; as monkeys that they taught in their schools and created jobs for with their stimulus plans for. And the least that the monkeys could do is pay their taxes, because the monkeys didn’t build that. You did.

You do plan to take care of monkey's medical expenses, at least until they get too high, and spay and neuter it with free birth control. You will train it to be the smartest and most well-behaved monkey it can be. And when it gets too sick, you plan to have it mercifully put down so it doesn't hang around spreading diseases and depressing you with its misery.

And what's wrong with any of that? Human beings are just evolved monkeys. It's not as if you're being cruel to the monkey. You're engaged in what you might charitably think of as a symbiotic relationship with the monkey. If the monkey were smart, it might think of you as a parasite. But you have a whole lot of rounds of ammunition stockpiled in case of a Planet of the Apes scenario.

If you assume that there is as much of a substantive difference between the elite and the common man as there is between a man and a monkey, there is nothing particularly inappropriate about such behavior. We herd animals. Liberals herd people. The human being is the livestock of the liberal animal farm.

The Nazis believed that they were the master race because they were genetically superior. Liberals believe that they are the master race on account of their superior empathy and intelligence. There's an obvious paradox in believing that you have the right to enslave and kill people because you care more, but that didn't stop millions of people from joining in with revolutions that led to a century of bloodshed in the name of movements that cared more.

The defining American code is freedom. The defining liberal code is compassion. Conservatives have attempted to counter that by defining freedom as compassionate, as George W. Bush did. Liberals counter by attempting to define compassion as liberating, the way that FDR did by classing freedoms with entitlements in his Four Freedoms.

On one side stands the individual with his rights and responsibilities. On the other side is the remorseless state machinery of supreme compassion. And there is no bridging this gap.

Liberal compassion is not the compassion of equals. It is a revolutionary pity that uses empathy only as fuel for outrage. It is the sort of compassion practiced by people who like to be angry and who like to pretend that their anger makes them better people. It is the sort of compassion that eats like poison into the bones of a man or a society, even while swelling their egos with their own wonderfulness.

Compassion of this sort is outrage fuel. It is hatred toward people masquerading as love. And that hatred is a desire for power masquerading as outrage which in turn is dressed up as a deep love for others and empathy for all living creatures. Peel away the mask of compassion and all that is underneath is a terrible lust for power. And the only way to truly justify the kind of total power summoned by such lusts is by reducing the people you would rule over to the status of non-persons.

The clash that will define the future of America is this collision between the individual and the state, between disorganized freedom and organized compassion, between a self-directed experiment in self-government and an experiment conducted by trained experts on a lab monkey population. And the defining idea of this conflict is accountability.

To understand the left's position on nearly any issue, imagine a 20th
Century American and then take away accountability. Assume that the
individual is helpless and stupid, has little to no control over his own
behavior and is only responding to stimuli and functions in a purely
reactive capacity. Then use that data to come up with a response to
anything from kids getting fat to a football player shooting his wife to
terrorists firing rockets at Israel. The only possible answer to
reactive behavior is to find the thing being reacted to and condemn it.

If
you want to fake being a member of the left on any topic and in any
setting, master this simple phrase. "But we have to look at the root
causes to see who is really responsible." Congratulations, you can now get by anywhere from Caracas to Brussels to Berkeley.

The root cause is a perpetual search for an accountability vested in systems rather than people. That search always ends up with systems and ideologies, rather than mere people, because it justifies the destruction of those systems and ideologies. And destroying systems and ideologies allows them to be replaced by their progressive replacements.

The final failure of accountability for the left is a failure of moral organization, while for the right it is a failure of personal character. The right asks, "Why did you kill?" The left asks, "Who let him have a gun?", "Who didn't provide him with a job" and "Who neglected his self-esteem?"

Freedom goes hand in hand with personal moral organization of the individual by the individual. Organized compassion however requires the moral organization of the society as a whole. A shooting is not a failure of the character of one man alone, or even his family and social circle, it is the total failure of our entire society and perhaps even the world, for not leveraging a sufficient level of moral organization that would have made such a crime impossible. No man is an island. Every man is a traffic jam.

Social accountability on this scale requires the nullification of the personhood and accountability of the individual, just as the moral organization that it mandates requires removing the freedom of choice of the individual, to assure a truly moral society. When compassion and morality are collective, then everyone and no one is moral and compassionate at the same time. And that is the society of the welfare state where compassion is administered by a salaried bureaucracy.

Choice is what makes us moral creatures and collective compassion leaves us less than human. The collective society of mass movements and mass decisions leaves us little better than lab monkeys trying to compose Shakespeare without understanding language, meaning or ideas, or anything more than the rote feel of our fingers hitting the keyboard.

This is the society that the left is creating, a place filled with as many social problems as there are people, where everyone is a lab monkey except the experts running the experiments, and where no one has any rights because freedom is the enemy of a system whose moral code derives from creating a perfect society by replacing the individual with the mass. It is a society where there is no accountability, only constant compulsion. It is a society where you are a social problem and there are highly paid experts working day and night to figure out how to solve you.

60
comments:

Shawn
said...

The root cause of this is Republican indifference to life and caring. That is the entire argument in a nutshell.People on the right care for money and not people it really can be broken down into that common denominator.The right talks bit, but there are no actions to fit the blow.

I believe it was Saint-Just, that monster created by the French Revolution, who justified state terror on the grounds that he was actually merciful as those condemned would not have wished to live in his perfect state.That same attitude is at the core of modern liberalism. In the end the liberal state will have to kill us, the non perfect or incapable of being perfected onesDave S

Poor Shawn can't see his own slavery to a Narrative that's been fed into him since birth. I've observed Animal Farm being co-opted by the Left as though it wasn't about themselves and that's been a breathtaking thing to see over the years. So I do the same thing with The Matrix: the children of the Left have been plugged into a projected reality for so long that to withdraw from the narrative-nectar is to feel alienated and vulnerable and gasping for air.

The school massacre provides a valuable moment to learn something and the Leftwing banana fetching monkeys are apparently too primitive to see it. Here we had a building full of unarmed social mass, lacking one single individual whom had the ability to provide the basic human instinct of self preservation, thus leaving all in that building to the mercy of protection by State. The State did eventually and in a timely manner arrive to save them, but not soon enough to prevent 27 deaths.

If guns are as rampant in our society as the left has us believing, what would the odds have been that not one other adult in or near that building was in possession of a firearm that could have been used to defend those innocent children? Adults have failed to keep our children safe because they forfeited that right to the Nanny State.

It's not only that the state is slowly removing a person's right to defend herself. There's also the issue with today's twisted concept of law and justice. If there had been an armed civilian neraby to shoot and neutralize this deranged murderer, there would also be a wacko asking for a full investigation of this hero, second-guessing his motives and suing the rescuer and his family and the school for shooting before starting a dialogue with the murderer in order to try to determine the causes of his anger. What if the poor soul had been abused in his childhood, if he had endured many nights of solitary play with only his X-box, maybe his parents had fed him too many or to little twinkies.

Today's "monkeys" are at the mercy of the lethal combination of unscrupulous bureaucrats with too much time in their hands and too little real work to do and over-ambitious lawyers.

Gun control is largely based on the premise that the State will serve as an effective instrument of crime prevention. You won't need a gun (we don't trust you with guns anyway, you might be a maladjusted cipher of society). Leave gun-toting to the professionals, to the authorities. Right.

You must deliver yourself to the mercies of every random nut case who finds a gun and you must count on the authorities to arrive in time to "prevent" your death. But, then, someone name me a time when the authorities did arrive in time to prevent a single killing in a school, office, or factory. Sure, there are instances of the authorities arriving in time to shoot the killer – but only after he's killed one or a dozen people.

Gun controls also assume that the State is omnipotent and can "prevent" crime. But it can assume the attribute of omnipotence only by "managing," regulating, and controlling everyone's actions. But then such omnipotence is a fraud. Those actions may take the form of creating suicide vests or pipe bombs or poison or using ice picks or tire irons, and not necessarily guns. But the criminally minded flout all laws and will find a way to procure guns, so they aren't really concerned about prohibitions or gun controls.

Gun controls are also intended to disarm an enslaved citizenry, as Daniel points out in his column, so that they are not able to fight back when SWAT teams show up to arrest anyone for having defamed or mocked Islam or Christianity or Barack Obama's legal and biological antecedents or Press Secretary Jay Carney's lying nerdiness. That is the secret, unidentified motive behind all calls for gun controls. Daniel points out that gun controls are also a form of thought control. "Don't even think of raising your voice or that cap pistol, because if you do, the wrath of the State will burn you to a cinder."

Not that trading shots with a trained SWAT team will have an outcome beneficial to the targeted citizen. He knows he will be out-gunned by shooters using the weapons prohibited to the citizen. In which case, the citizen is disarmed by fear of facing down the Miller Gang (re "High Noon"), usually alone, and assuring his own death.

So, if more stringent gun controls are enacted by Congress, and approved by a cowed American public, where do we go from here?

Brilliant - one of your best. Especially liked this perfect summation of the left's attitude: "And the way that you think of a dog, is the way that the left thinks of you. When you misbehave, the left looks around for your owner."

"You must deliver yourself to the mercies of every random nut case who finds a gun and you must count on the authorities to arrive in time to "prevent" your death. But, then, someone name me a time when the authorities did arrive in time to prevent a single killing in a school, office, or factory. Sure, there are instances of the authorities arriving in time to shoot the killer – but only after he's killed one or a dozen people."

The typically arrive promptly in hostage situations. Otherwise they get there too late.

While I would never own a gun I have no problem with those who do (provided they are responsible).

Gun control has a lot in common with orders of protection in cases of domestic violence. As if a violent criminal will not act just because there's a piece of paper telling them not to.

Excellent! Want to know what lies at the root of why the Right is failing to propogate it's message of freedom, and the mechanics of how the Lefts message of forced compassion is spread? Listen and read Roy Masters, www.fhu.com

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

An insightful piece from Daniel, possibly his finest. But now the question must be, 'What do we conservatives do to combat the left?'

At least one place to start is with language. For far too long we have let the left have control via their memes, narratives, and ever-amorphous definitions. One possible example of how to combat this is provided by Vox Day, who uses the rhetoric of the left against them: "..if they genuinely wanted to reduce the likelihood of the mass murder of schoolchildren, they would ban mass schooling." (For the entire article see <a href="http://voxday.blogspot.com/2012/12/homeschool-or-die-part-562.html>Homeschool or Die, Part 562</a>).

This kind of response is not defensive, it attacks. It not only reduces the leftist elite to frothing rage because they have no direct rejoinder, but it provides a wedge-like wakeup call to the zombified masses in the form of a new, hopefully thought-provoking meme. And much, much more could be done. We need a private institute devoted to coming up with conservative memes, phrases, slogans, and all the rest. All individual conservatives could also contribute their thoughts to such an effort.

God, I hope some type of coherent effort takes off soon and gathers momentum, because otherwise we are all headed for re-education camps and worse as the left gets ever more emboldened by its power.

The problem with guns seems similar to the problem with the welfare state. Let me explain. The welfare state can work for a time when the recipients are small but eventually they grow to outnumber the productive members of society. Now I'm afraid with the dumbing of America along with a nation-wide moral collapse and other problems looming the number of irresponsible gun owners will outnumber the responsible gun owners. While I am not for gun control and do not think it is possible, I also do not trust most people who own and carry weapons. Just the other day I was in Costco eating a hotdog and a hispanic fellow was chatting up a 30-something woman. He moved in a something dropped from the back of his pants - it was an automatic. Clak, clack, clak it as it bounced on the floor. He retreived the weapon and put his finger to his mouth as if to "shush" anyone who saw his mishap and might say anything.

As is always the case, Daniel makes some very thought provoking analogies of the differences between conservatives and liberals.

ericcs-you make a very important point but I believe it is much too late for us to win the language battle against the left. They have so many different sources and decades of practice in establishing in the minds of the masses that evil acts are actually benevolent, compassionate, and promote freedom. ---ELAINE

Unfortunately or otherwise, a large component of culture is based on and inseparable from racial characteristics. Leftists are all zealous believers of evolution (in large part because it negates any need for God), and yet they refuse to believe that evolution does not stop at the neck.

Reality is racist. Say it again, over and over, proclaim it loudly from the rooftops, because it is Truth.

For reality to exist, it depends on distinctions and differences. Only the leftist believes otherwise, living in a fantasyland of oversimplified, overgeneralized mental memes, narratives, and abstractions. In large part the leftist mindset can exist only by distorting language to support incessant overgeneralizations, leading to a dismal feedback loop of self-imposed thought-control.

In thermodynamics, the situation in which everything is absolutely equal is called 'the heat death of the universe'.... take serious note of the word "death", because that is all the left offers: a dystopic death-cult society of all tribes against all, with the leftist elite cunningly in charge subsuming any inherent individuality to a ruthless statist tyranny.

Fsy--I don't that is what he is saying at all. You're right about evolution being impossible, but that's not to say that the extreme left is trying to evolve people intellectually, emotionally etc. Shades of Flowers for Algernon (Charlie). Intellectual evolution followed ultimately by the death of Charlie and the mouse Algernon.

A couple of years ago, an African American church posted billboards against abortion. There was a lot of media attention in that a black church was anti-abortion. But the media overlooked the content of the billboard:

"Black children are an endangered species." Species. The media totally ignored that word--species. I believe a large number of African Americans vote Democratic, but they part ways when it comes to abortion.

In support of reality, an objectively moral society therefore should have a two-fold approach: starting from local organizational levels on up, it must recognize inherent ethnic/cultural differences so that the successful dominant culture remains dominant, and simultaneously recognize individual distinctions and concomitant achievement based on meritocracy and equal opportunity, but never in pursuit of equal results.

In this as in all things political, it must fully understand the concept of optimality. It should strive for a dynamic most optimal approach, as opposed to some static theoretically abstract perfect and/or most efficient approach.

Historically, this necessarily requires a constitutional republic, and not a "two-wolves-and-a-sheep-voting-on-dinner" democracy.

Shawn is a glittering jewel of colossal ignorance. He sounds like one of those maggot crawling losers who infested City parks last year. His breed are the drones of the French style revolution that inevitably eats its own children. L'espece d'idiot!!

Ai yi yi, people. You are aware that this is not the only country in the world, right? Someone has told you that other countries have successful, safe, prosperous democracies with many policies considerably less "conservative" than ours, right? That their citizens are happier, better educated, healthier and would scoff at the notion their government is not responsive to and respectful of individual rights? Jesus.

There's so much tiresome typing going on in Daniel's post that it's tough to pick the dumbest point, but here's my guess: "The clash that will define the future of America is this collision between the individual and the state, between disorganized freedom and organized compassion, between a self-directed experiment in self-government and an experiment conducted by trained experts on a lab monkey population. And the defining idea of this conflict is accountability." Since Daniel is so eager to tell liberals what we REALLY think, allow me to return the favor. "Accountability" in your disorganized freedom utopia will be administered by the guy with the biggest gun with the highest capacity magazine who can draw fastest and is willing to shoot first.

"Ai yi yi, people. You are aware that this is not the only country in the world, right? Someone has told you that other countries have successful, safe, prosperous democracies with many policies considerably less "conservative" than ours, right? That their citizens are happier, better educated, healthier and would scoff at the notion their government is not responsive to and respectful of individual rights? Jesus."

"If there had been an armed civilian neraby to shoot and neutralize this deranged murderer, there would also be a wacko asking for a full investigation of this hero, second-guessing his motives and suing the rescuer and his family and the school for shooting before starting a dialogue with the murderer in order to try to determine the causes of his anger."

And as the saying goes, "It is better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6."

Daniel, that's not the lesson I extracted from American history, but it is the lesson I extracted from your post. And I'm still wondering where all the stuff about monkeys and Nazis came from. Nevertheless, I always admire the legendary willingness to fight to the last man bravely standing up to the soul crushing might of the remorseless nanny state (nannies with F16s!)in the name of freedom. It makes real life seem so dull by comparison.

Public schools are the primary agency for molding kids into trained monkeys. Public schools also keep children confined in a "gun-free zone" where killing them is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. Need I go on?

"The root cause of this is Republican indifference to life and caring."--Shawn, you're a programmed drone. That is a Liberal bumper sticker and has no place in fact.

"People on the right care for money and not people"--Shawn, it is in fact the Left that cares only about money, because that is the Marxist ideology in a nutshell. It's the foundation of class warfare. All Liberals care about is who has more than them and who doesn't. Attack the wealthy because they're wealthy. Redistribute our personal income to remake society the way they want to see it. Redistribute national wealth to Third World nations because we're "too successful" and "stole" it all from them. The Left is obsessed with money.

All you've done, with both of these statements, is exactly what the Left has been doing for the past 30 years; projection. You do what you know is wrong, then you blame your opposition for doing it. That's why all Liberals are hypocrites.

The Left believes they have a mandate from the election they stole, (I grew up in Chicago so I know of such things, although I didn't expect the Democrat infection to go national...), that grants them total dictatorial power. The Country Club GOP just wants to pump up Wall Street, since inbreeding has made them incapable of thinking past the next finacial quarter. The Tea Party is still trying to side step the shooting war, but the Left insists on blaming them for their own failures.

Re-read Bruce Catton's "The Coming Fury." This time, however, we have no R.E. Lee to stop the IEDs and sniping. We'll still have the ditches filled with bodies, tho.

You make it sound so black and white. I made a considered and rational decision on whom to vote for, knowing that both sides do and say stuff that drives me crazy. Calling the "other side" a bunch of mindless slackers may make you feel good but its not going to convince anyone except those in your own echo chamber.

There is an inherent dissonance in the right's rhetoric. How can one side be so much for freedom - an argument that appeals to the Patrick Henry in me - while telling me that their religion will be forced upon me via law? How can one side be against big government yet go to war in such an ill-conceived and unpaid for fashion?

I do not know your personal beliefs; this is an overall comment on how I see a vast segment of what Barry Goldwater decried in 1998 - the takeover of the Republican Party by the religious right.

There is no side I enjoy voting for and no one that represents my views: fiscally conservative; against the patriot act; yet socially "liberal" and in favor of Choice and gay rights.

So, Mr. Anonymous, where in the Constitution does it say that there shall be an established religion? Yes, that's what you just said. Nowhere in the Conservative movement do I see any hint of a desire to establish a religion. Not even from the most radical Christian evangelicals. From Islamists, yes. But Islam is the darling of the Left in this country, not the Right.

The problem is that Wahsington - The Left as well as the Right - is it's corrupt and greedy and has not been held accountible for their organized crime deeds. They're just out for themselves and have forgotten the principles for which this country was founded on and why we left Europe in the first place. It's time to clean house in Washington by settling term limits on Congress (both Houses) and stop letting them screw everything up for our children's children.

Why is it that people can only slam me with insults and name calling rather than real debate or comment? If anyone was so sure I was wrong it would make more sense to tell me why rather than attack me.Since I posted I have been called names and insulted in response.There has not been one decent response.

The State. That's exactly what the current administration and liberals seem to want to enact. The State is all powerful. The State will take care of you from cradle to grave. The State will grant your every need. Yet where will The State get all the money for this? Where they're getting it now...by printing more fiat money, and suggesting that we allow The State to "redistribute" the wealth of those who worked FOR that money. Because, as we all know, the wealthy don't deserve to have all that money so we need to take it from them. Unfortunately, once all the wealth has been redistributed, there won't be any more wealth to steal, so everything then goes to Hell in a handbasket and those "evil conservatives and libertarians" are blamed because they didn't go along with the plans of The State in the first place.

“Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Choice is the cornerstone of freedom. As choice is given up (or taken away), freedom fades. In a free society, people have the “right” to make poor decisions. But the left does not believe in personal responsibility and reaches for legislation and policies to remove the possibility of a poor decision.